Conferenza
Referente – Fabio Bacchini | DADU, Università degli Studi di Sassari

Kelly E. Happe | University of Georgia
The environment is political

30 Luglio 2024 dalle 10:00 alle 12:00
Complesso del Santa Chiara, Aula Lai | S4a
Codice e link Microsoft Teams: 3vm8oif – Link: https://bit.ly/3WrlZUd

In this talk, I will focus on how “environment” is political in ways that we do not necessarily recognize. In particular, I will try to critically reflect on how we shape and employ the concept of “resilience” to think of the environment. “Resilience” is sometimes criticized for being too conservative of a concept, as it is often framed as the ability of people, communities, and environments to “bounce back” after repeated violence and trauma. However other scholars advance a more transformational understanding of resilience, one that offers a way to think about how systems and the people that comprise them don’t just adapt—they learn, transform, and even completely break from older ways of thinking and being. This talk will consider these different meanings and discuss whether resilience, as opposed to other concepts such as anti-fragility and utopia, can provide the conceptual and political means to truly transform a society confronting a number of social, economic, and environmental crises.

Kelly Happe is Professor of Communication Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Georgia, where she teaches and conducts research in rhetoric, Marxism, and biopolitics. She is the author of the award-winning The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity After the Human Genome Project and co-editor of Biocitizenship: The Politics of Bodies, Governance and Power, both published by NYU Press. Her current book project, The Body Plastic: Rhetorics of Race and Value in Science is under contract with NYU Press and she continues work on a series of essays on Marxism and utopia.